“I’m satisfied with the fact that we got the qualification. Let’s not forget that last year around this day the team had been eliminated by Hapoel Be’er Sheva and the club was in a crisis. The problem in this moment is that our side hasn’t played enough matches. Tonight our side didn’t have the same behaviour as on the first match. There we won 3-1 and everybody was expecting that the same would happen. However, what happened was the thing I had stressed to my players. It wasn’t going to be the same. Partizan had the pressure on the first match and now we were the ones that everybody expected to play a similar match. That was the trap: everybody was expecting the same thing to happen. Everybody was expecting a similar match and that’s not easy to happen. Having said this, we need to work. Our players are not all ready. We have to work really hard because we have two weeks ahead of us to be prepared. On the first match we had a different behaviour. Maybe the condition of the pitch had a role because we had to risk on the long passes and the pitch made it hard to us on the low balls. Maybe this is a justification for us, but we have to prepare and to work”.
On the few number of matches: “It’s a human reaction. Even though we did many things right. The players’ condition was very good during the week. All of us had in our minds that it was over. I can talk to the players and tell them it’s not like that, but when the match starts, the players think human-like. What we have to do is to prepare ourselves well for the next match. If Vukovic had scored the third goal and if he hadn’t left with some pain on his legs… Nevertheless, all these are situations we don’t want to think about. We want to think about the next stage’s match”.
If the team faces problems in the defence: “What problem did you identify?”
On the chances that were conceded: “From what I remember, we conceded a chance in Belgrade and we conceded one goal. Today we conceded one chance and Kapino made a very nice save. I don’t think we have a problem in our defence. Also on the first match Romao played in the defence and today we played with another player. Therefore I believe that we don’t have a problem in the defence”.
If the team is closer to what he wants to present: “No, we’re not even close. We’re instable. We don’t have a steady development. We make a good match and then we don’t. We have many players that aren’t ready and we want to improve them, like Emenike. We haven’t played many matches and we lack automaticity. When people tell us we have a very good team, it’s a thing we believe. We were all expecting to be better today because we were playing in our stadium. The truth is we lack stability. We played a very good match away and we were expecting to do the same. We have 15 days to prepare ourselves, we have booked a friendly match and we’re looking for another one. The truth is we were expecting to be better. We have a long way ahead of us”.
On the draw: “I prefer the easiest team for us to have a chance to go through. I can’t control it. On the first draw we got a difficult opponent, because Partizan is a difficult opponent. This moment there are teams that might let us go through and what we want is an easy opponent”.
